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Open Govt. Partnership Validation Will Strengthen Anti-Corruption Reforms -Malami

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By Ebere Agozie

The Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami says the validation of the second Open Government Partnership (OGP) National Action Plan (NAP) will strengthen the anti-corruption reforms of the present administration.

NAN reports that OGP, is a multilateral initiative that aims to secure concrete commitments from national and subnational governments to promote open government, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance.

Malami, made this known in Abuja during the stakeholders retreat to validate the draft NAP.

“As we may all recall, OGP is a product of President Muhammadu Buhari’s commitment to strengthen anti-corruption reforms.

“Flowing from the President’s commitment at the Anti-Corruption Summit, Nigeria joined the Open Government Partnership in July 2016 as a tool to foster transparency and accountability through targeted measures.

“This means that Nigeria is determined to promote fiscal transparency, improve public procurement and open contracting, access to information, asset disclosure, citizen engagement and empowerment thereby consolidating on on-going reform efforts within and outside the public service’’.

According to Malami, `unlike the first NAP with four thematic areas and 14 commitments, the draft of the second NAP has seven thematic areas with 16 commitments taking into consideration the need to roll over outstanding commitments from the first NAP

The new thematic areas are Extractive Transparency, Inclusiveness and Service Delivery while the ones that have been retained are Fiscal Transparency, Anti-Corruption, Access to Information and Citizen Engagement.

“I am therefore confident that the second NAP Document before us has taken care of Nigeria’s contextual issues and OGP Global priorities, in the areas of impact, inclusion, participation, gender, public service communities, service delivery, health and education policies.

“So I enjoin all participants to ensure that Nigeria will achieve a validated second NAP to be presented to the President for his signature.“

He urged stakeholders to use the opportunity to plan and work together in the spirit of co-creation, as this is the only way to overcome the challenges of having a sustainable Open Government.

“I am deeply grateful to all stakeholders for your zeal and passion in the implementation of the OGP principles in Nigeria since 2016 when Nigeria signed on to the Global Initiative.

“Looking at the place of technology in OGP, I hope that more MDAs and CSOs will join the effort to make public documents and activities transparent and more accessible to the citizens.

“It is my hope that our engagement today will bring to the fore inputs driven by the quest to make quantifiable and positive impact in the lives of Nigerians, especially as it relates to participation in government’’.

Dr Tayo Aduloju, the Incoming Non-State Actors Co-Chair of OGP National Steering Committee said that the relevance of the 2nd NAP to Nigeria’s social, political and economic needs depend on the outcome of the retreat.

Aduloju, who was represented by Mrs Seun Ojo said that the value of the retreat is self-evident.

“The most important ingredient in the recipe of success is transparency, and transparency builds trust.

“This second NAP reinforces our commitment to eliminating all forms of corruption and corruption prone system.

“So we anticipate that we seek deeper, wider and more extensive collaboration, coordination and cooperation in our country to end corruption, recover the proceeds of corruption and prosecute corrupt practices.

“This action plan offers us the opportunity to have access to information legislation which will facilitate democracy.

He said that legalising access to information will ensure that citizens have access to information required to participate meaningfully in a democratic process.

“It will ensure that politicians and leaders remain accountable to citizens, as the NAP seeks to achieve revenue transparency,’’ he added.

NAN reports that the OGP provides a platform  for reformers inside and outside of governments around the world to develop initiatives that promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption and harness new technologies to strengthen governance.

It is a voluntary partnership that countries opt to join and through which civil society organizations, in collaboration with government, can advance initiatives that they deem in line with their reform agendas.

   

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Time Nigeria is a modern and general interest Magazine with its Headquarters in Abuja. The Magazine has a remarkable difference in editorial philosophy and goals, it adheres strictly to the ethics of Journalism by using the finest ethos of the profession to promote peace among citizens; identifying and harnessing the nation’s vast resources; celebrating achievements of government agencies, individuals, groups and corporate organizations and above all, repositioning Nigeria for the needed growth and development. Time Nigeria gives emphasis to places and issues that have not been given adequate attention by others. The Magazine is national in outlook and is currently being read and patronized both in print and on our vibrant and active online platform (www.timenigeria.com).
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The Missing Middle of Infrastructure Finance: Why Capital Still Fails to Become Infrastructure

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  By Chidi Nwafor  In October 2023, a Gulf sovereign wealth fund quietly closed a $2 billion allocation to global infrastructure, earmarked in part for emerging-market energy and transport assets. The announcement drew the usual applause: another sign, commentators said, that institutional capital was finally waking up to the infrastructure opportunity in the Global South. Eighteen months later, less than a tenth of that allocation had actually left the fund’s balance sheet. Not because the mandate had changed. Not because the fund had lost appetite. According to two people familiar with the portfolio, the constraint was simpler and more uncomfortable: there were not enough investable projects to put the money into. This is not a story about a reluctant investor. It is a story about capital that wants to move, cannot find enough places willing and able to receive it in a form it can underwrite, and quietly waits instead. Multiply that fund by the hundreds of pension schemes, sovereign wealth vehicles, commercial banks and infrastructure funds now carrying dedicated allocations for emerging-market infrastructure, and a pattern emerges that rarely makes it into a headline: the world is not short of capital for infrastructure. It has capital in historic abundance, sitting adjacent to a historic infrastructure gap, unable to cross the distance between the two. The Comfortable Explanation  The explanation on offer at every major infrastructure summit is a familiar one. Global infrastructure investment needs run into the tens of trillions of dollars over the coming decade; committed capital falls well short; therefore, the problem is one of insufficient funding, and the solution is more of it: more pledges, more blended-finance facilities, more climate funds, more multilateral capital increases. It is a comfortable explanation because it assigns responsibility clearly to governments who under-fund, institutions who under-commit, and it offers a clean remedy: raise more. It is also, on close inspection, not what the evidence shows. Pension funds globally hold trillions in assets under management with explicit infrastructure allocations that remain structurally underweight, not because trustees have rejected the asset class but because deal flow meeting their risk and governance thresholds has not materialised at the pace their mandates assume. Sovereign wealth funds report the same pattern. Commercial banks with dedicated project finance desks describe pipelines that look full at the term-sheet stage and thin dramatically by financial close. Development finance institutions, whose entire purpose is to absorb risk that commercial capital will not, routinely report that their binding constraint is not capital adequacy but the volume of bankable transactions their teams can originate and structure in a given year. None of this fits the scarcity narrative. All of it fits a different one. Availability Is Not Deployability  Capital availability and capital deployability are not the same condition, and the conflation of the two is doing real damage to how the world thinks about the infrastructure gap. Availability asks whether money exists somewhere with a mandate that could, in principle, be pointed at infrastructure. Deployability asks something much narrower and much harder: whether a specific project, at a specific moment, has been engineered, structured, documented and de-risked to the point where an investment committee can approve it without exception. The first condition is met, overwhelmingly, across nearly every category of capital that matters to infrastructure. The second is met by only a small fraction of the projects competing for it. The result is a market that looks, from the outside, like a financing gap, and functions, from the inside, like a conversion problem: an abundance of capital on one side, an abundance of infrastructure need on the other, and an underbuilt set of mechanisms in between capable of turning one into the other at any meaningful scale. Where the Conversion Breaks  The break does not happen at the ends of the process. It happens in the middle, in the unglamorous sequence of work that turns a plausible concept into an instrument a fiduciary can sign. A promising transmission project needs a feasibility study rigorous enough to survive institutional scrutiny rather than optimistic enough to attract early interest. It needs offtake arrangements that hold up under real counterparty and currency risk, not the counterparty risk assumed in a base case. It needs environmental and social documentation calibrated to the standards of the institutions being asked to fund it, not the standards of the jurisdiction hosting it. It needs a legal and commercial structure that allocates risk in ways a commercial lender, not only a development financier, will accept. It needs a sponsor capable of executing what has been proposed, not merely capable of proposing it. Each of these is ordinary project finance discipline. None of it is exotic, and in mature infrastructure markets it happens as a matter of course, absorbed into systems built over decades: specialist advisers, standard-form contracts, established procurement norms, deep pools of transaction expertise. What is missing in the markets where the infrastructure gap is largest is not the standard itself but the machinery that meets it. Projects arrive at investment committees with ambition intact and preparation incomplete, and that gap is treated, again and again, as an individual project’s failure rather than what it actually is: a structural absence in the systems responsible for producing investable transactions at scale. 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The Global Comparison  Mature markets solved this problem gradually and mostly invisibly, through decades of institution-building that predates the current infrastructure conversation: specialist project finance units inside banks, standardised PPP frameworks, established regulatory playbooks, deep benches of transaction lawyers and engineers who move between deals rather than between one-off assignments. Emerging and frontier markets are not being asked to meet a lower standard. They are being asked to meet the same standard without having built the same machinery, and then being told, when deals fail to close, that the problem is insufficient funding….
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